The Adventures of Zer0 and Maya
by Veymorak
Summary: Maya was bored, and then the world started ending and she got a lot of stuff on her plate. Zer0 was bored, then the world started ending and he got an STD. Sorry, I mean, a Space Time Distorter - a... well, they went through time and space and both their lives got a lot stupider in terms of content, and a lot poorer in terms of quality.
1. Chapter 1

**The Adventures of Maya and Zer0**

Maya was freaking out.

The Siren wasn't one to panic easily – she was often one of the most level-headed people you would ever know, and even though that didn't mean much if you lived on Pandora and anyone that could be considered levelheaded was usually also absolutely insane in the brain, she was actually pretty chill. She sometimes lost her cool – when she had put a bullet in Handsome Jack's brain, she had followed it up with several more bullets until Jack was left not only dead but considerably heavier than when he had been alive. But discounting those rare moments – which she would later come to consider not so rare as she and her life as she knew it descended further down the rabbit hole of intergalactic police chases and the assassination of space wizards that used space magic – she was likely one of the most sane people to have ever set foot on Pandora.

Maybe, she would later lament, it was her sanity that was making her panic uncontrollably. Maybe only a sane person could understand the horrors of the world that she lived in, and maybe only a sane person could panic because for the love of god Zer0 was not panicking and his sanity was definitely questionable.

What had happened, she might have asked herself if she hadn't seen it herself. What had started it all?

Well, it was probably when the world was going to end. That was a pretty good place to begin the tale.

 **I**

It had been a cool night. The air was crisp, she remembered, and the soft breeze made her hair tickle against her neck as she leaned back and stared up at the sky. The Pandoran sky was beautiful at night – one of the few beautiful things about the wasteland where everything always wanted to kill you and devour your bone marrow – and the moon she knew to be Elpis hung over her head like a reminder of Hyperion's reign, with the hideous H-shaped space station hovering in front of it like a brand. Even with the station, however, she could appreciate the view. It wasn't nearly a good enough reason to stay on the planet and risk your life and limbs, but Vault Hunters never needed a reason for that, and she was a Vault Hunter now – a verified Hunter of Vaults, what with having opened one herself now.

Every once and a while she would think about why they weren't moving yet – why they weren't searching for those Vaults that they had seen back in the Vault of the Warrior. They had been numerous – she literally couldn't have counted them all if she wanted to, and the prospect of such adventures had left her trembling with anticipation; her unique upbringing had made any sort of knowledge or experience the kind worth pursuing. She had spent years kept away, and now her desire to explore had all exploded out at once and instead of following it all she was stuck waiting for the green light.

Lilith. Lilith was the reason they weren't on the move yet. Maya respected her fellow Siren – the woman had taught her a lot of what she knew, after all – but the wait was slowly killing her. Lilith was gathering information on the locations of the nearest Vaults, and her caution and triple checking had made the process incredibly slow; she didn't want what had happened with Jack and Angel and Hyperion to ever happen again. Maya understood this.

But it was so boring. You could only read the same books so many times, and when you lived on a planet where the amount of people that could read let alone write rose in negative correlation to the number of people that had killed a man before it was tough to find new reading material.

Star gazing – that was her new hobby. She could see the moon, she could feel the tug of the Vaults, she could barely stand still, it was awful.

Maybe it was a passing star that granted her her unspoken wish for adventure. Maybe it was a cruel twist of fate, like the lies spoken by a deceptive genie as they granted the wishes you never quite wanted but definitely asked for. Maybe some otherwordly force was messing with her reality as she knew it, controlling the world around her like a sick puppet master with a shitty sense of humor.

Regardless of what did it, she could never quite take her wish back. Not after it had been granted.

" _Eridian tech,"_ a voice mumbled from nearby, and she looked over her shoulder to find a lithe figure pacing back and forth in the control room. She had no idea where everyone else was – maybe drinking or playing games or watching Psycho Ball – but the room that was connected to the balcony was void of any movement short of the leather-clad figure that stalked around the table, speaking in a husky and synthesized voice. _"A gate to new challenges / it cockblocks me so."_

Maya smiled a bit as Zer0 spoke to himself in a series of quiet haikus, apparently unaware of her presence on the balcony. He looked to be thinking about something – she couldn't even begin to guess what, and she could hear his thoughts as he vocalized them with what he thought to be no one around – and eventually he grumbled something she didn't quite catch, before sighing loudly. She had never known the man to show much distress in all their time working together, and the sound was a new one to her ears – it was not just a bored or annoyed sigh, but an undoubtedly tired and worn down noise. She didn't even know if he could get tired, but he sounded so.

" _Needs a catalyst. / A power source. Battery. / Perhaps a… stupid."_

"Never seen anyone talk to themselves on Pandora before," she called out to him as he rubbed his gloved palm on the visor of his helmet, red hashes and exclamation marks and other random symbols flickering across its surface. He spun to look at her, symbols disappearing until only an exclamation point remained. "At least, not in haiku. Are you unwell? Stressed? Bored?"

Zer0 looked like he was debating something with himself as ellipsis flickered over his false face, before eventually he ditched whatever he had been doing and came over to stand next to her. Old blood stains speckled his armor as slightly darker patches amongst the somewhat discolored surface, and they became more apparent under the moonlight – he must have been doing a different type of work recently. She found this odd, as killing bandits had stopped being something that interested most of them a while back; they were weak and no challenge. Fighting them was pointless and repetitive, and to be honest it was a bit grating to kill a bunch of people for no reason aside from the five dollars in their pocket. Nowadays Axton and Sal were more interested in drinking themselves to the verge of death before being promptly revived by Doctor Zed and his mysterious needles – it was almost a problem, but Maya had learned long ago that alcoholism on Pandora was less of a problem and more of a lifestyle.

She didn't know what Zer0 occupied his time with at this point. She liked Zer0 – she was probably the second best sniper they had when discounting Mordecai, who was at least sharing first with the Assassin if not taking it completely – and they had ended up spending a decent amount of time fighting side-by-side in the wastelands. She didn't know jack about him, pardon her french, but he seemed like a decent enough guy when he wasn't slicing people in half or whatever. But after Jack, he had just kind of… dropped off the grid. Became harder to find.

" _All of the above,_ "he said, peering over the parapet and down into the street. Sanctuary was coming up to its golden age, and she had a feeling that that was part of what was taking so long for them to go after other Vaults – Lilith wanted to stay and keep their home safe as much as she wanted to blaze new trails. _"I am bored, Siren – so bored. / Challenge sings to me."_ He sounded a little bitter. _"But my voice is gone. / I cannot answer the call / It's awful, Siren."_

Maya snorted at the way he addressed her. Never Maya – unlike Axton and Sal, her name had the same number of syllables as what the bad guys called her. A Siren – no need to swap it out for her name, so he never did. She was offended once, but had come to accept that that was just the way he was. "I know how you feel. I can't stand this waiting around – we should be out there. Hunting those Vaults."

" _We can fly so high / but adventure is still here,_ " he said, and it surprised her. She didn't think he would say anything aside from perhaps a mumble of agreement. She looked at him, and found that his head was cocked ever so slightly – he was kind of almost looking at her. It was a weird feeling that ran up her spine as he did so; it was as if someone had walked across her grave. She loved that saying – she'd read it in a book and it had stuck with her since it felt like it was a very poetic way to describe being given a bad feeling so strong it made your skin cold. _"On the other sides."_

"The other sides?" She snorted, turning to look back over the street. People weren't looking up at them – hadn't for weeks. Excitement had died down and now their novelty had worn off – they were washed out. It wasn't a nice feeling, but until they got to those new Vaults it was one that she would bear on her shoulders. "Other sides of what? The planet? I was getting the feeling that no matter where you went, you'd just find more Pandora."

Zer0 sniffled at that, but didn't elaborate. He was quite the character, she knew, but that was somewhat weird even for him. He was acting different – very different.

" _Maya,"_ he said instead, using her first name for the first time she could remember. This peaked her interest and her ears perked up as she looked at him again, cautiously. His tone was graver than she had ever heard before, and it was somewhat unnerving. He was indeed acting different, and she was still getting that bad feeling. _"Doom coming. / You must help me save the world / Or we will all die."_

If Maya had been drinking something, she would have spit it out. Instead, she leaned over and picked a bottle of Rak Ale from Mordecai's box of nutrients and flipped the cap off with a flick of her thumb and an airy whisper of pressure being released. She took a swig as Sal had taught her to do. She spit it out as Axton had taught her to do.

A jet of the disgusting ale that some suspected might just be Skag piss mixed with cleaning alcohol spewed from her maw like the flames from the Warrior, spraying everywhere and coating the marksman's helmet in a thin veil of spittle and beer like it had started to rain disgusting Siren-saliva.

Maya had learned that this was something that people enjoyed doing for entertainment and occasionally recreational purposes, but she had never done it before outside of the one time when she was alone in The Dust with a barrel of Moonshine and a book labeled Lust and Sin, which for its name was filled with plot that she rather enjoyed. Now, however, as she stared at Zer0 and his muck-covered mask, she felt like she had done it wrong, and this disturbed her to some extent as he stared at her.

"Sorry," she apologized to him, trying to use her sleeve to clean some of the ale off of his helmet. To her disgust, it only smeared around and made her clothing stink like Skag piss and cleaning alcohol, and she soon gave up with a pat on his shoulder as compensation for her misdeed. It wasn't an all expense paid trip to Sev's dry-cleaner down the way, but it was all she could do for him as he wiped a four-fingered handprint down the glass. "Sorry! I took way too much of that stuff before spitting, got it all wrong. My fault." He didn't say anything, and she noted that his helmet now smelled like crap. How unfortunate – she'd have to find him a cloth or something after she finished explaining why what he had just said was absolutely insane and made no sense. "I just… what?"

" _This world is ending. / Pandora will cease to be / Everyone will die."_

"T-That's… That's what I thought you said." She sighed and set the bottle down on the parapet, leaning on it. She felt a bit drained now, and she didn't know why – it was crazy talk. How would he know? This might very well leave her with a headache, and that wouldn't be fun for anyone. "You can't just drop a bomb like that. It makes you sound crazy. Now let's back up," she said, "and you tell me what the hell you're talking about."

" _The world is ending. / A comet will destroy it / we'll be turned to dust,_ " Zer0 told her, more slowly this time as if that would make it easier to understand. She was beginning to feel a bit panicky now – the Assassin didn't tell jokes – and gripped the parapet for support. Yes, she could feel the headache coming on. _"It's not a riddle. / We must leap through time and space / and not fucking die."_

"Ignoring the last little bit," Maya said, feeling very ill now at the sudden and brutal delivery of the news. Perhaps he had thought it would be like ripping off a bandaid, but she might throw up now since she knew he was dead serious. "What about everyone else? Why me? How? How do you know? When?!"

Zer0, who for the most part was ignoring her mental breakdown and rapid hyperventilating, looked down at his wrist as a holographic watch appeared around it, floating like one of Saturn's rings.

" _Twenty."_

"Oh god oh god-" she began, forcing down her nausea. Her vision was beginning to swim a little, and all of this being delivered at once might very well kill her if she didn't begin to calm down. Where was a paper bag when you needed one, she wondered as she nearly entered a fit of dry-heaving. "Twenty what?" she demanded, "Hours? Minutes?!" This couldn't be happening.

Zer0 tilted his head, and reached into one of the many pockets on his sneaking suit without answering her question. She watched with wide eyes, her legs almost giving out under her while he drew a pair of keys from one of his many pockets with a cheerful jingle. The chain it was on had a tiny psycho mask on the end of it, and she realized it was kind of cute.

Suddenly the entire world was rocked as a booming thunder rolled through the sky, and to her horror she realized it sounded like a moonshot barrage. But when no missiles bombarded the city or its shield, she felt confused and looked up in the sky.

Soaring towards the planet of Pandora, and she could tell for it was growing in size by the second, a brilliant ball of flame had begun to engulf the sky entirely, blocking part of the moon out as it closed in on the planet. She was awed by its ninja-like appearance as she watched it quietly, aware of the murmurs of confusion and fear coming from the street below. It was rather strange that she hadn't noticed its approach, but now there wasn't anything to be done about it.

" _Seconds,"_ On his visor, numbers had begun to flicker rapidly, starting at twenty and going down at an alarming rate. _"I can't leave. / Not without your help, Siren. / No time to talk now."_

"W-What do I do?" she asked, feeling crazy.

" _Follow me quickly,_ " he told her simply, and he hurried into the control room.

With no other choice, Maya quickly followed him as he had asked her to, ever so aware of the rumbling that was growing louder and had begun to make the tables shake and the doors rattle and Mordecai's beer bottles roll across the ground. Blood stains ran across the walls, she noticed as they walked through the desolate halls of the Crimson Raider's HQ at a moderate pace. Idly, she couldn't help but feel that they were going at a rather leisurely pace for people running from the apocalypse.

When they reached the first floor, Maya actually threw up. She had felt it coming and managed to get to Tannis's garbage can, and her lunch as she knew it exited her body the way it had come in, overtaking the awful taste of Rak Ale that had been left in her mouth and replacing it with something at least equally disturbing.

Slumped against the wall and covered in more blood than which could be lost by a human being before they perished, a familiar figure clad in a black leather sneaking suit laid with his head lolled to the side, mask cracked and helmet rusted from a lack of proper care and maintenance. One of his hands was draped loosely over an old chipped sword, while the other had been put up to his forehead and had its fingers shaped in an L, reminiscent of the Loser sign Gaige was fond of making at bandits as they were torn limb from limb by her giant robot, Deathtrap.

When she was finished puking, she screamed and pointed to the dead Zer0 that was laying there, still as a corpse. She didn't really have words that fit well enough to describe her horror, so she just screamed and pointed. She didn't know how long she did it, but eventually a sharp slap from the not dead Zer0 silenced her screaming, and she was hurried along past the still bleeding carcass. _"I don't want to talk about it,_ " he said as he herded her along.

Eventually they reached their destination, or what she could only assume to be their destination.

Propped up in the middle of the room, a rickety old box of wood and metal stood alone and silent, appearing quite out of place in a room made of rusty metal and scrap. The paint was chipped away, but the exposed light bulb on the top still flickered on and off in a simple pattern as the rumbling continued to rock Maya's world like a salt shaker, and she realized she was going to die following around a madman.

"It's a box," she said numbly, her shoulders dropping as reality hit her hard. This was it. "We're all dead."

Zer0 pushed her aside and jammed his keys into the brass lock of the box, the glass window set in the old door rattling from the force in which he did so. When nothing happened he switched the key out for the other one that was on the ring, and the door swung open with a soft click this time. She didn't know what the other key was for, but didn't ask since dead people don't remember things.

" _Come Siren,_ " he said, taking his keys and stuffing them back into one of his pockets before climbing into the tiny box. It was tall enough to fit him, but also narrow like a phone booth or something – she didn't think there was enough room for the both of them, but when he waved her in she decided she didn't have much of a choice in the matter really. _"Climb in. /It's bigger on the inside. / I lied. It isn't."_

It took some shuffling and awkward groping about, but eventually the two Vault Hunters were fit snugly inside of the Phone Booth, and she was instantly hit with a wave of claustrophobia as he reached over her shoulder and pulled the door shut. She heard the lock click tight again, and despite the windows that she could see on the outside the inside was cool and dark, like a cave. She could smell the Assassin and what she thought might have been cologne mixing with blood, and she prayed to god that she didn't throw up on him as he fiddled with something in the dark over their heads.

" _This looks about right,_ " he said, and she decided he didn't know what he was doing after all. Maybe he could save them if he wasn't crazy or messing with her, but she told herself not to get her hopes up. " _Won't see this world for a while. / Say goodbye, Siren."_

"... What about the others?" she asked him, trying to get comfortable. It didn't seem to be possible, as every direction she shifted in she found one of his bony limbs digging into her body. "What happens to them, Zer0? Are they going to be alright?"

" _Don't think about it."_

 **4…** his visor read **3… 2… 1**

The entire box shook for a moment and she squeezed her eyes shut tight, and then everything was still and black.


	2. Chapter 2

**Here's where I personally consider the story to actually start. Feedback is appreciated, but a smile is good enough for me. You may notice that this story parodies various shows and the like - if you did, good, it means I'm not messing up yet.**

 **I**

When her world lit up again, she was almost blinded. It felt like she had been trapped in the darkness for days, with only two soft sets of breathing and the infinite pain caused by Zer0's elbow to let her know that she was still alive, and hadn't died many hours prior. The searingly bright light forced her to shield her eyes and she sacrificed her pride for her retinas, cowering from the sun like Batman until she was inevitably forced out of the Phone Booth by the Assassin that was on the far (read as furthest from the door and not actually far) side of the little box.

Maya let out a groan of surprise as her legs gave out beneath her, the once solid concrete foundation of the Crimson Raider's base of operations turned to nothing but sand and bits of rock. The night sky was gone, replaced by a stormy looking dusk that was clouded and yet so insurmountably bright to her poor seeing holes. With no strength left in her body and no food in her stomach she toppled like a tower, dropping into the crunchy sand as rain beat lightly on her back.

She wasn't dead. That was her first thought as she came to her senses moments later and spat out the gritty earth that had seen fit to take up residence within her mouth. She could still taste puke and Rak Ale and was getting the feeling that it was a combination that would never quite leave her mouth as she rolled over to find Zer0 examining his precious Phone Booth. Now that she wasn't under threat of immediate death, she could see it was barely holding together, with rusted nails sticking out at the edges and the brass lock being the only thing that looked like it had been repaired in the last thirty years.

"Zer0!" she shouted, rolling again and trying to claw her way back onto her feet. The sand beneath her shoes churned under her flailing legs and made it hard to regain her footing, but she had nothing else in her mind but to charge the insane Assassin as she lunged for his turned back, tattoos blazing with confused energy that had no true direction. "Start making sense before I melt your _fucking brain!_ "

Zer0 must not have been expecting the attack, and he had only begun to turn with his sword half-drawn before she was upon him – a flailing ball of arms and rage that beat against him with unmatched fury and determination and directionless hormones. The human body was a volatile thing, and when forced into a fight-or-flight scenario – which may or may not be what the world's destruction as one knows it is classified as – it boiled down to a choice that the Siren was making posthaste. His back thumped against the door of the Phone Booth and the glass that didn't actually appear on the inside rattled in its frame while a red exclamation mark appeared on his helmet.

" _Siren – calm yourself!"_

"Calm?! You want me to be calm?!" she screamed as he tried to break free. He was bigger than her, but blue and purple and pink lights swirled around them and pinned him to the wooden door like chains, restraining him and keeping him in place neatly like the kinky handcuffs that could be found under Moxxi's bar. "The world was just about to explode, and now we're- we're-" she stuttered and she hated it as she looked around, noting the wooden dock and seemingly abandoned structure further down the beach. "We're in who the hell knows where! I- I- I can't be calm I'm fucking losing it, Zer0! What the hell is-"

" _Siren you must calm yourself! / Calm yourself Siren-"_

"No no no! Shut up-" she shouted, her tattoos beginning to burn marks against Zer0's armor. "Everything is missing! We're on a beach in the middle of nowhere and I just watched the world end before being dragged into a fucking Police Box and now we're on a beach in the middle of fucking nowhere!" Her voice was shrill and her eyes were wide with primitive panic as she stared into the unfeeling depths of his visor. "I saw you dead! There was a dead you and he was dead! I think you killed him – you killed you, Zer0, and the world ended and what the fuck?!" He tried to say something, but she released one of his arms and brought a finger up to where she guessed his mouth might have been. It was flowing with deadly energy, and she was on the verge of blowing his head off. "Shut up for a minute, Zer0!" she yelled, "Shut up or I swear to god, I'll-"

For the second time in the past ten minutes, she was shocked into silence as Zer0 slashed swiftly at her face, his leathery palm snapping across her cheek as if he had lots of practice with slapping people that were having mental breakdowns. She stared at his helmet wordlessly in the resulting echo, and after a couple seconds he for no apparent reason brought the hand back around and her head whipped in the other direction with another crack.

She let go of him, still gasping for air and never able to get enough as she stumbled away numbly. She could probably kill him, but there wouldn't be a point – the world had just ended and now they were dead. She must have been in hell, because she couldn't swim and Zer0 was here with her. She was dead and now they were both in hell – maybe she could find Sal if she looked hard enough. The sky was darkened and now her eyes were adjusting; above she could see lightning tearing through the clouds as the light on the horizon waited at a safe distance, further than the rolling thunder would ever travel.

The unknown structure in the distance looked to be made out of rusted tin and chains, and she could now also see that there were docks on either side of it – wooden docks made out of real wood, and not piles of scrap salvaged from the junk of Pandora. The air was crisp – not smoggy like it usually was, like she had become used to.

" _You fried it, Siren,_ " Zer0 said from behind her, evidently having returned to his Phone Booth. _"Phone Booth – not a Police Box. / 'Least we got away."_

"Zer0, I'm freaking out," she said softly, her weak legs returning. This was a lot to take in, and now she was wondering if she was having a nightmare or if she had been slipped drugs – it couldn't be real, could it? "I'm gonna go find a rock to bash my head against. If I die in the dream, I'll wake up in real life again. That's how dreams work."

She knew that was pretty much a science in itself. Dying in a dream or nightmare was usually the last thing you remembered about said dream or nightmare, and thus cause dictated that dying must be a trigger to wake oneself from said nightmare. She was like, fifty percent sure that was how it worked, but Zer0 seemed to beg to differ as he ran after her stumbling self, catching her by the arm a bit more gently than before.

When he spun her around, he was as unreadable as ever, but his tense and rigid posture had vanished now, and he took her hand and shoved something warm and pulsing into her grip before closing it again.

Almost immediately, she felt her mind clearing and her strength began to return as he held her in place by the hand, his tight hold keeping her own fingers clasped around whatever he had forced into her her possession. Her breathing steadied and she felt a bit better as a chevron/number three formed heart lit up on the face of his visor, likely as some sort of comforting gesture.

" _I did not save you / So that you could kill yourself,_ " he told her as he released her hand once he apparently deemed it fit to do so. When she opened her hand up, she found a tiny cylinder of dark purple sitting in her palm like it was meant to be there, now cool and still and silent. It was drained Eridium – she'd seen it before after Lilith used it, but never indulged in what Zed claimed to be an unhealthy behaviour herself. It was small – she supposed it wouldn't hurt. _"We have much to do."_

Five minutes later she found herself sitting on one of the smaller rocks that dotted the shore, the smooth stone seating her bottom quite comfortably in comparison to the tight confines of the Phone Booth that was certainly not a Police Box. The light of said Phone Booth, she could now see, was dead and shattered with fragments of glass jutting out of the socket. Zer0 himself was searching through the inside of what seemed to be a different entrance to the box, and though she could not see into it he threw out various items she had never encountered in her time in the darkness.

" _He, I, came to me,_ " Zer0 said as he tossed what appeared to be a chunk of a Vault Key over his shoulder and into the sand, where it was joined by a box of hair clips, half of a rusty pipe, the barrel of a Sabre turret and the bloodied blade of a buzz axe. She listened to him attentively, her mind now clear as water while she did her best to ignore the familiar items that were beginning to pile up on the beach. _"A number from the future / in a Police Box."_

"I thought you said it was a Phone Bo-"

" _He had a warning,_ " he continued without pause, ignoring her attempt at interrupting his story as he pulled out a box of lightbulbs. He stepped back and slammed the alternate door shut, dragging the Vault Key piece over and using it as a stepping stool to reach the top of the Phone Booth. _"He perfected my research / Leapt through time and space._ " Zer0 began unscrewing the damaged light bulb with one hand as he brought out a new one with his other. _"I killed him, Siren. / Stabbed him in the fucking face. / Got his STD."_

Maya flinched like she had been slapped again, her swinging feet grinding to a halt while she watched the Assassin litter without any care for the environment as he tossed the old broken bulb into the sand. "You got his STD," she repeated, staring blankly. "I thought you stabbed him in the- oh god, what did you stab him with exactly, Zer0?"

" _With my sword, Siren,_ " he said, causing her to cringe while the Vault Key piece broke in two under his foot. She couldn't tell if it was real or fake, but the sight of such a beautiful relic being destroyed made her do a double cringe. It was almost as bad as what the madman in front of her was saying. _"Took his Space Time Distorter. / I shared it with you."_

"Oh god stop talking."

" _It's our STD / it belongs to both of us. / Sharing is caring."_

"Space Time Distorter," she suddenly realized, her warm cheeks cooling in an instant as she realized what he was actually trying to tell her. She supposed it was harder to deliver messages when you were limited to seventeen syllables – like a more convoluted Twitter post or something. She sat up straight, staring at him as he kicked the Vault Key chunk away. "That's the Police Box's name?"

" _It is a Phone Booth,_ " Zer0 told her simply, causing her to sigh. He gracelessly dumped the remaining light bulbs from his box back into the STD and closed it up again, leaning against it. She wasn't sure if he was just messing with her now or if he was dead serious, but she didn't think she was comfortable with the fact that she had been inside of an STD. _"And yes – Space Time Distorter. / Live under a rock?"_

"You're telling me we…" Maya frowned, biting her lip as she was wont to do in stressful situations. She was by no means a dumb person – maybe a bit naive due to being raised in isolation, but certainly a smart woman all around – and now with the necessary information provided the pieces were all falling into place right before her very eyes. The world had been ending and now it wasn't, and now they were somewhere else entirely due to a Phone Booth delivered by a different Zer0 from the future itself. "You're telling me we, what, traveled through time and space?"

" _No I'm not, Siren / I'm saying we're in hell now / We died, went to hell."_ His words oozed with sarcasm that made her look down at her feet – he sounded like he was disappointed or something similar, and it was somewhat discouraging. _"Psyche. There is no hell. / We traveled through space and time, / Eridian Tech."_

"That's cool," she said with nothing else to really say about such a declaration. She couldn't really call bullshit after what she had just seen – and reality was relative even if she was dreaming. It was complicated, but she knew that if she was dreaming then it was probably just as real as Pandora, which in turn is the nightmare of literally everyone off of Pandora and at least half of the people that lived on Pandora. "So you needed me to power it and now we're… somewhere. Right?"

" _Smart girl. Yes, that's right,_ " Zer0 said, causing her to smile a bit. He was much easier to talk to when he wasn't being a sarcastic prick, she noticed as she circled the STD and opened the side they had come out of. With light and a clearer mind, she could now see that the inside was filled with exposed wires and computers – and no, she agreed, it was not bigger on the inside after all. He climbed inside and began fiddling with one of the still smouldering cords, and she found herself wondering how he knew what he was doing if it wasn't his STD. _"You're too powerful, Siren / Fried our STD."_

"Please stop calling it our STD," she requested tiredly. "It's upsetting."

" _Life is upsetting / But we all shoulder burdens. / Deal with it, Siren,"_ he said as one of the circuit boards that the cable he was trying to extinguish made a crackling sound, and he was sprayed with a shower of brilliant yellow sparks. _"We need some new parts,_ " he said as he tried to extinguish himself now, patting at his smouldering leather armor. _"My STI is damaged. / It's no good, Siren."_

"We need a new STI? Are you fucking serious?" she asked, feeling even more disconcerted than ever before. She hadn't felt this disturbed since Krieg had worn that one Bandit's spine like a necklace – with the brain still attached to the Axis like a pendant. That had been quite the morning – she still remembered the screaming. "I don't think I'm qualified-"

" _No no no no no,_ " Zer0 cut her off quickly and concisely, waving his hands at her as a new patch of flames erupted on his back. Even as he tried to beat them out he continued to explain: _"A new Space Time Interface. / Please try to keep up."_

"Sorry." She wasn't sorry, but she was realizing now that everything would go faster and she could probably get home all the quicker if she just went along with what he was saying. Half of what he was talking about didn't make much sense to her – STIs and STDs and how they were different from STIs and STDs – but if she pretended she knew what he was saying he probably wouldn't stop to try and explain the semantics of it. She didn't care, so it worked out as it saved them both time, it saved him breath, and it saved her hassle and headache. "Where do we get one then, Zer0? What do we do to save the world when we get one?"

" _It's very simple."_

She didn't believe him.


	3. Chapter 3

Arrows peppered the sand at her feet as they sprinted madly across the beach, Zer0's limp slowing him down to the point where she was left supporting him as so that he wasn't left behind and killed by the evil skeletons that were trying to murder them to death. She hadn't thought that this was the way her day would go when she woke up that morning but life, she lamented, was full of surprises. She didn't think the world would end and that actually happened too, so putting it all at the back of her mind and keeping one foot in front of the other was starting to feel like the best course of action currently available to her.

Maya didn't understand the science behind the skeletal archers dressed like something out of a medieval holotape, but she knew that arrows hurt and Zer0 was a prime example of arrows hurting as he cursed and hissed and snarled to himself with every step. The shaft that stuck out of his thigh quivered with each movement, and she couldn't gauge how bad it was until they stopped – but due to the fact that it was an arrow stuck in his thigh, she was assuming for the time being that it was pretty bad.

" _We must keep running,_ " Zer0 rasped as they scrambled over a pile of rocks. She didn't know where they were going, but the volleys of primitive projectiles that rained down harder than the actual rain kept her moving all the same. Up ahead she could see the tin-and-chain structure that she had noticed earlier, and to her horror she could now make out the armor-clad bowmen that lined the top like soldiers. _"They will show no mercy. / Run, for Pandora!"_

"Z-Zer0, I don't think we can get out of this by running," she gasped as she stumbled to a stop, even more winded than he was. She knew there was a reason that she didn't believe him when he said it would be simple, and they were barely out of the gate before being defeated not only emotionally but soon to be physically. The archers behind them were closing in, clearly pleased to have cornered their prey as they stopped firing and began chittering amongst themselves, their jaws opening and closing with several dry clicks and clacks. They were stuck now. "Why the hell didn't you just bring us directly to where we were supposed to go?!"

" _Oh, I'm so sorry / It was really hard to see / With a smogged up mask,_ " Zer0 told her, referencing to her blunder with the Rak Ale. She hoped that he wasn't being serious, because the idea that their current predicament was indirectly caused by her was a depressing one. _"But no, by all means / Snark your way into your grave / while I try to think."_

Maya cursed as they were quickly surrounded by more of the skeletons. Now it wasn't just archers, but several swordsmen had joined the fray as well with wickedly sharp blades that promised pain and suffering the likes of which she had never experienced before. She could see her terrified face reflected in the polished surface of the closest of the deadly instruments of bloodshed, and she quickly banished her fearful expression in an attempt to mask her absolute terror. No good to show weakness – gotta outplay them or something, she thought.

Zer0 had told her that they were to sneak across the beach and into the settlement to search for a new STI, but his plan had changed quickly when he had caught a glimpse of the skelemen that patrolled the beach like soldiers. Apparently he had seen them before – she did not know where – and the thought of being caught by them was one that he described to be of insurmountable horror and a promise to endless suffering. He had said they as bone men were naturally inclined to violate their victims in every sense of the word, and while she wasn't sure if that was true or not she did not wish to find out the hard way. Not only did she have provocative photos of herself on her Echo communicator, but she liked her anal rectum as it was – that was to say, unravished by cruelty and anything else.

She cursed herself for not thinking to bring a gun to-

"Zer0, I have a gun," she suddenly said, reaching down to her hip and feeling the comforting iron at her side. It was a Maliwan SMG – easily her favourite gun, and she had many – and it was chambered with thirty incendiary rounds, each big enough to punch through a War Loader. She couldn't believe she had forgotten about it – and didn't dare to imagine what would have happened had she not remembered. "I have a gun."

Zer0 looked at her with a tilted head, and she looked down to see that he too had a weapon of his own holstered on his other, undamaged thigh – a Jakobs revolver. She wasn't such a fan of Jakobs due to the lack of elemental damage, but she knew quality when she saw it; they just might be able to fight their way out.

But, she thought to herself as she surveyed the crowd that surrounded them, should they? Zer0 said they would be absolutely destroyed by the skeletons if they were caught, but how would he know it he'd never traveled through time and space before? What if they weren't assholes like she had thought, and-

Zer0 shot one of them in the skull with his gun. She didn't notice him drawing it until the shot rang out as a deadly report and the skeleton stumbled backwards, his cranium reduced to blood and bone fragments that went everywhere – all over. They were on his allies, the sand, some of it was on Zer0 and some of it was on her, it was incredibly messy and it stopped her train of thought cold as the echo faded.

The army of skeletons that surrounded them did not react at first, clearly shocked into silence by the display of cold blooded murder, and Maya felt a little more than just pity for them as one left their station to crouch next to the already cold corpse after it had dropped into the sand. What looked to be tears poured out of his eye sockets as he put a hand on the blood-soaked shoulder of his dead comrade, and intelligible mumbling began to circulate amongst the fantastical creatures.

"Sam… Sam…" the one skeleton that was kneeling next to the dead swordsman said, his voice surprisingly human. In fact, Maya was surprised that it could talk at all, and had assumed them to be incapable of speaking english, what with a lack of vocal chords. "Sam…! Oh god… Oh god!"

"What the fuck!" Maya hissed, snatching Zer0's gun out of his hands as the Assassin stared at his handiwork. More of the skeletons had begun to converge on the casualty like moths to a flame, their bone-white chins dipped in mourning as some of them removed their helmets and pressed their hands against their breastbones. As more blood and bone marrow leaked out onto the sands, she slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a gasp. It had been swift and brutal. At least they probably couldn't even feel pain. "Seriously. That was so uncalled for."

" _They can't feel pain. Probably."_

"He's dead…! He probably died in indescribable agony due to his chronic Hyperalgesia. Poor Sam…" another skeleton said, shaking his head sadly. "What do we tell Yvalta? His kids?!"

"I say we don't."

"They deserve to know, dammit!"

Maya felt sick as she threw the revolver in the sand, wiping her hand on her pants afterwards. She didn't want to touch it after watching it used to take such an innocent life – it was quickly becoming apparent that these sentient creatures were not bandits, as bandits rarely ever married and never ever actually remembered who their kids were – well, that one was a lie but at the same time not completely inaccurate either.

Zer0 took a step towards the tightly knit group of skeletons, an exclamation point on his visor as he lifted a hand towards them, as if to touch one of their hands or arms despite the distance that was between them. Blood and marrow had spattered a pattern across the face of his helmet, but she thought that was probably the last thing on his mind as he examined the bone fragments that were sticking to the hand that had fired the gun. She wondered if he could even feel remorse – the only time she'd ever seen something close was when Roland and Angel had died back-to-back, like a horrific marathon on TV. Whatever he was feeling, she noticed, mustn't have been too good, since his shoulders slouched and his gaze turned back towards Sammy the deader skeleton.

" _Don't pin this on me,_ " he said, looking around and trying to find someone to meet his gaze. He didn't sound pleased as no one locked eyes with his mask, and his tone was one of regret and bewilderment as when he spoke. _"He pulled a bow on me first! / Shot me in the thigh!"_

One of the skeletons stood up, tears in his sockets as he faced the still bleeding Assassin with his big empty eyes. The red light that was present in all of their eye sockets were dimmed and sad looking, and he pointed his sword at the Vault Hunter with a tip that shook unsteadily with anger and pain. His voice was nasally from the damaged nostril holes that looked to have caved in partially, and it made Maya cringe a little when he talked.

"Sammy didn't shoot you, you son of a bitch! That was me – I shot you! I did it you fucker! I'd do it again if I could!" he screamed, his helmet falling off as he leaned forwards as if to carry his voice and rage through the air with a better signal or something of the like, Maya wasn't a poet and neither was the author, don't judge. "You hear me, you fleshy freaks?! We're gonna take you to Skeleton Jail assholes," he said breathily, evidently overjoyed by the prospect, "And we're gonna violate the living hell out of you – I'm gonna post the pictures all over the Echo Net, and then I'm gonna-"

There was another crack as Zer0 shot the skeleton mid-speech, this time in the femur with yet another revolver that he had gotten from somewhere.

"How many guns do you _have_?!" Maya demanded, taking this one as well from his grasp as the body dropped like his friend's had.

"Oh my god they're going to kill Kent too!" one of the skeletons screamed, holding his bow over his head as if to protect himself from any possibly incoming bullets. Zer0 might have shot this one too if Maya hadn't seen it coming, taking a third gun out of his hands before he had the chance to fire. She hoped that was the last, but she doubted it – he had a lot of fucking pockets, she noted. "He shot Kent for no reason! Why don't we have guns, oh god please-"

" _He was armed, angry / would have stabbed me in the ass / got my STD,_ " Zer0 defended himself, and Maya sighed as she realized modern day speech was prone to using acronyms to shorten long names regardless of how they sounded. That was the world they lived in now, and she couldn't change a generation no matter how hard she tried. How sad. " _The choice was not mine."_

"Kent's sword is melted to his hand!" the same skeleton that spoke before said, his head bowed towards the sand. All around them, skeletons were dropping to their knees with their hands over their skulls in a sign of defeat, and up on the tin wall behind them bows were being cast over the edge. "He can't put it away – it got stuck to him when one of the orcs set off a bomb near one of our camps, and he stopped it from causing damage to his kids by putting it in his rib cage!"

Maya's guilt intensified and an ellipses appeared on Zer0's mask. Her day was getting even worse, and she hadn't thought it possible.

" _Well that is stupid. / I guess the Orcs killed Kent, then. / Nothing to be done,"_ he told them simply, snatching his gun out of Maya's hands with a respectful nod in her direction. She wanted to close her eyes tightly as he began pointing it around – daring them to move wordlessly like he was holding up a bank or something – but found that she couldn't due to the fact that this was what a coward would have done. She would have tried to put together a plan to disarm the Assassin promptly after this realization, but decided to put it off when he did not shoot any of them immediately. A zero flickered to life on his visor, and she instead went over to examine Ken. The skeleton was, she noticed, twitching and trying not to move too much as blood flowed from his leg. Perhaps playing dead was one of their natural self defense systems – this not only made a certain amount of sense to Maya, but was so incredibly ironic she could taste the irony on her tongue while she patched the leg up; though the taste might have been some of the blood that she had unconsciously licked from the side of her mouth. Was probably a bit of Sammy, she decided. Tasted like a Sammy. _"You can save yourselves. / I need a new STI / Do you guys have one?"_

The skeletons began looking around at one another, mumbling quietly while she bandaged Kent's femur. She could hear some of the words that were spoken a bit too loudly, and the hesitance was causing Zer0 to thumb the trigger impatiently. She hoped she didn't have to Phaselock him – sparring with a man that may not be where you think he is was something that was incredibly hard to do, and from what she had heard, having him trying to actually harm you was much more than just unnerving; you were either a dead man walking or a captured one that was about to start talking. The man that had told her this spoke in very catchy rhymes, and Lilith had shot him after he entered a catatonic state of perpetual ranting to himself when he reached the word orange and became desperate to find a word that rhymed with it. She, out of curiosity, had later looked it up and found that the word Sporange was actually real. The more you know.

"Well mister, I don't much know what you'd want with an STI," one of the skeletons said as he stood up, reaching down for the buckle of his pants. Maya almost began to dry heave as he began undoing the clasp and prepared to take off his trousers – she fucking knew STI was a stupid and inconvenient acronym, and now Zer0 was about to figure it out too. Not wanting to see a boney willy, she screwed her eyes shut tightly and turned her head away. "But I do got one right here if ya need it."

When there were no gasps of shock or cries of horror or anything that she would expect, Maya opened her eyes to find that the Skeleton had indeed pulled down his pants. But, unlike a human, he did not have any junk to bump this story up to an M rating. Instead, he just had skeleton things. Maya didn't know and neither did the author, as neither were doctors. Instead, the skeleton had a fanny pack attached to his crotch, which was what had been causing the bulge she had been polite enough not to comment on mentally or verbally. She, needless to say, had many questions, but was simply too shocked to voice them as the skeleton opened the fanny pack.

"Now let me see 'ere… where did I put that gol darn Space Time Interface?" he asked himself as he rummaged through it. He looked up with a sideways glance at the two time and space travelers as he dug around in the pack on his crotch. "You two gonna keep staring, or you wanna come over here and help me look? It's a big bag you know."

"I… I-I'm fine here," Maya said as her words returned to her. The world was insane, and if she didn't stop gawking at every anomaly she would later realize that she would never do anything but gawk. "I'm sure you'll find it – it's not the biggest I've seen."

"Yeah, I know I know," the skeleton waved her off as Zer0 gave no answer aside from removing his finger from the trigger. "It's a hand-me-down, okay?"

Eventually the skeleton let out a triumphant grunt and drew a big computer chip from within his bag, and she wondered why he had it in the first place as he tossed it over to Zer0, who caught it with his free hand. Zer0's gun dipped as he held the chip up, examining it in the dim light of the beach with a smiley face being projected over the glass of his helmet. She assumed that was what he had been looking for, as he pocketed it with a nod.

" _This is what I need. / You can put your pants back on / your fanny's showing."_

"Nah, I'm good."

" _For the rest of you,_ " the Assassin continued, easing the hammer of his firearm into an uncocked position with his thumb but not lowering the weapon. She winced at her choice of words – uncocked was a dangerous term when surrounded by bone-men that were all lacking in genitalia, and she wasn't sure if it would offend them. _"Throw down your arms and get lost / take Play-Dead with you."_

Kent sat up and grunted, brushing Maya off as he was helped to his feet by his friends. He didn't seem too happy that his ruse had been seen through, and Maya wanted to tell him that he was probably the best fake corpse she had ever seen in an attempt to boost his confidence – not many people could say they were missing all of their internal organs and that their body consisted of human bones held together by what was probably magic.

Eventually the beach was almost empty and desolate after the skeletons had dispersed, and she was left alone with Zer0 and the headless corpse of Sammy the skeleton.

"...You just mugged a skeleton at gunpoint for the STI he was keeping in the fanny pack attached to his crotch," Maya said after she was sure that they had all retreated behind their tin wall. Her bones ached as she climbed to her feet – it felt like she had been like that for hours, and the Eridium must have been wearing off. Zer0 was already leaving, and she jogged after him while she talked. "That's what just happened. I can say that and for as stupid as it sounds it's the truth, isn't it?"

" _Killed one of them too. / Today wasn't a bad day,_ " Zer0 said, leading her back to where they had left the Space Time Distorter. She felt cold and numb, and it wasn't just the fact that the beach's winds were freezing cold – she was pretty sure that she was having a panic attack, and the world was quickly losing color. _"Not great, but not bad._ "

She sat back down on her favourite rock when they reached their point of arrival, and watched as he climbed back into his Phone Booth Time Machine with the STI in hand. Sparks were still spraying lightly from where the tiny explosion had occurred previously, and without any grace he ripped the charred computer card off of the wall and threw it into the sand, where it exploded violently with a loud boom for no apparent reason. She gave no reaction to the detonation. "I want to go home. I don't care if there's a meteor hurtling towards it right now – at least death on Pandora is normal."

" _Oh yeah… about that,_ " Zer0 said slowly as he forced the STI unceremoniously against the wall where the old one must have been installed. The hesitance in his voice caused her to sit up straight, bringing her brain back to the world and waking her up again so that she could look critically at the Assassin as he worked. Whatever he was about to say, she instantly had decided, was not going to please her in the slightest, and it was obvious that they both knew it. _"I must use grandiloquence,_ " he muttered to himself as he looked away from her and focused on his work again. _"Lest I break her brain."_

"I can hear you, and I know what grandiloquence means," Maya said as he jammed what appeared to be random wires and cables into various ports on the Space Time Interface card. Her headache was coming back, and unlike the skeletons, this time it was out for vengeance. "What are you about to try and sugarcoat, Zer0? If you're going to say something, don't mince your words – I didn't come to Pandora because I thought my feelings weren't going to be hurt by-"

" _There's no Pandora / Everyone we know is dead / there is no Santa."_


End file.
